What is the cause of all this bustle and war I hardly know … How it will turn out I know no more than the man in the moon.
—LIEUTENANT TOM HOLDSWORTH, 1838
In late November 1838, Lord Auckland and Ranjit Singh presided over a grand ceremonial gathering, or durbar, at Ferozepore on the Sutlej River—the boundary between the Sikh and British territories. The occasion was both an affirmation of British-Sikh friendship and a demonstration of the splendors of the Army of the Indus about to depart for Afghanistan. The leaders paid reciprocal visits to each other’s camps and reviewed each other’s troops. Auckland’s sister Emily, who accompanied him, found the sights dazzling, especially the maharaja’s thousands of followers “all dressed in yellow or red satin, with quantities of their horses trapped in gold and silver tissues, and all of them sparkling with jewels.”
Sometimes the presence of so many thousands of soldiers, elephants and horses brought chaos. The British camp, Emily complained, was “dreadfully noisy … The cavalry have pitched themselves just behind our tents; one horse gets loose, and goes and bites all the others, and then they kick and get loose too, and all the syces [grooms] wake and begin screaming, and the tent pitchers are called to knock in the rope pins, and the horses are neighing all the time … Then the infantry regiment has got a mad drummer … He begins drumming at five in the morning and never intermits till seven … It was so like dear Shakespeare specifying the “ ‘neighing steed and the spirit-stirring drum.’ ”
The forces participating in the durbar were 9,500 men of the company’s Bengal army including some attached Queen’s regiments such as the Sixteenth Lancers, known as the Scarlet Lancers, resplendent in their tight-fitting scarlet tunics and plumed helmets. They were to be accompanied in the forthcoming invasion by 6,000 Indian levies, including one regiment of Nepalese Gurkhas, recruited, trained and officered by the British for Shah Shuja. The plan was that the joint force would march southwest from Ferozepore through the princely state of Bahawalpur and into Sind, where it would cross the Indus. Meanwhile, 5,600 men of the company’s Bombay army would embark in Bombay to sail five hundred miles northwest to Karachi—at that time a small fishing village at the mouth of the Indus—and thence march three hundred miles northeast up the river to rendezvous with their comrades at the town of Shikarpur, after which the whole army would move on through Baluchistan and the Bolan Pass to Quetta, Kandahar and finally Kabul.
This combined army would total just over 21,000, fewer than the number originally planned because following the Persian withdrawal from Herat its strength had been reduced by one division of 4,500 men. Auckland’s commander in chief, Sir Henry Fane, had used the reduction to suggest that he should no longer head the army, writing to Auckland, “I do not think that for this my service is needed.” Fane was anyway in poor health, doubtful of the wisdom of the mission and his tour of duty in India was soon due to end. In addition, unusually and to Fane’s displeasure, Auckland had given the task of organizing food and sufficient horse and camel transport for the advancing army not to the officers of the military commissariat but to Macnaghten and his team of political officers who would be traveling with the army. Fane foresaw that this and other delegations of authority to Macnaghten would cause friction between the military and political leaders, adding in his letter to Auckland, “I think too that your instructions to Sir William Macnaghten and to me are such as an officer of my rank could hardly submit to serve under.”
The sixty-year-old Sir Jasper Nicolls would, after much discussion in London, be selected to replace Fane and would arrive in India the following year. In the meantime, Fane planned to sail downriver for a while with his staff, keeping parallel with the Bengal force to oversee its progress. General Sir John Keane, commander in chief of the Bombay army, was to assume the supreme command after the rendezvous of the Bombay and Bengal forces.
In addition to the main Army of the Indus, the troops to be commanded by Shah Shuja’s son Prince Timur, who was to be accompanied by Claude Wade as political agent, were being assembled at Peshawar. Six thousand of the eleven thousand men would be Sikhs, but this was as far as the Sikh military contribution would go. This force was to take the most direct route to Kabul, marching through Ranjit Singh’s territories and the Khyber Pass.
Ranjit Singh, however, had announced that his dignity would be injured if the main Army of the Indus were to pass that way, hence the reason for its circuitous route through the Bolan Pass. The British were not overly concerned. As Captain Henry Havelock, aide-de-camp to Sir Willoughby Cotton, commander of the Bengal army, observed, “It was the policy of the hour to humour and caress the old ruler of the Punjab.” The British government had anyway decided that a detour through Sind might provide an opportunity to bring its still restive and resistant emirs to heel. As it advanced north through Sind, the Bombay force was to attempt to impose on the emirs a treaty of Macnaghten’s devising obliging them to allow the British unrestricted navigation of the Indus and—in return for Shah Shuja abandoning his claim to suzerainty over them or to the payment of any future tribute—to make him a large single payment to support his war effort.
There was thus only rejoicing at Ferozepore and a mutual exchange of gifts. Ranjit Singh gave Auckland a bed with gold legs and encrusted with rubies and emeralds, while Lord Auckland presented him with a portrait of Queen Victoria in a solid gold jeweled frame painted by his sister Emily. A British officer captured the magnificence and chaos as the maharaja made a courtesy visit to the British camp: “From beneath a massive canopy of dust emerged the motley array of Ranjit’s elephants and cavalcade. Now hundreds of gaily-clad Sikh horsemen—some in bright chain armour, others in various coloured silks and cloths of gold, brandished their long spears, flung back their brass embossed shields, and galloped with headlong fury around the maharaja’s elephants,” which were covered with “gorgeously-embroidered gold cloth” and on whose backs swayed howdahs inlaid with ebony and ivory. The red-robed and turbaned Ranjit Singh himself was wearing the fabled Koh-i-Nur diamond on his arm. To the watching officer, the red and blue uniforms of the British looked somewhat dull by comparison. In Auckland’s durbar tent, Ranjit Singh reclined on a sofa. To Emily Eden’s artist’s eye he looked “exactly like an old mouse, with grey whiskers and one eye.” An English officer thought him “slight in form, and his face expressive of the shrewdest cunning. The leer that occasionally escaped from his single optic seemed to tell a clear tale of his debauchery.”
In his own durbar tent of cashmere cloth supported by silver poles and with furniture “of frosted silver, inlaid with gold,” Ranjit Singh gave lavish parties for the British grandees, treating them to fireworks and performances by hoards of female singers and dancers. Emily wrote, “I could not help thinking how eastern we had become, everybody declaring it was one of the best-managed and pleasantest parties they had seen. All those screaming girls and crowds of long bearded attendants, and the old tyrant drinking in the middle—but still we said; ‘What a charming party!’ just as we should have said formerly at Lady C.’s or Lady J’s.” Ranjit Singh, whose own “unbridled devotion to ardent spirits” was obvious to all, pressed her to taste the fiery brew of pounded emeralds, brandy and oranges—a “horrible spirit, which he pours down like water. He insisted on my just touching it … and one drop actually burnt the outside of my lips. I could not possibly swallow it.” Yet at the military reviews she noted how the Sikh soldiers outshone the British in both dress and discipline: “Nobody knows what to say about it, so they say nothing except that they are sure the Sikhs would run away in a real fight. It is a sad blow to our vanities!”
On 10 December 1838 the Bengal army under Sir Willoughby Cotton set out on the twelve-hundred-mile circuitous trek to Kabul via Quetta, with Shah Shuja and his levies for symbolic reasons keeping two or three marches ahead. Cotton was a stout, good-natured, not overly bright man, of whom Fane had written, “I don’t think Cotton has a mind which carries away much of verbal instructions.” Macnaghten, who remained with Auckland, was to catch up with them later. The 9,500-strong column with its thousands of bullock carts, horses and mass of camp followers—an average of at least three for every soldier—stretched nearly forty miles. There were also thirty thousand camels. “What a sea of camels! What a forest of camels’ heads and humps and grain bags!” wrote one officer of the procession. “What resounding of sticks as the vast mass is driven slowly along, browsing as they go and leaving not one green leaf behind them.” Each camel took up fifteen feet of road and could advance at a speed of only two miles an hour, making them, as events would prove, easy targets for raiding tribesmen.
Fane’s request to his officers and men to travel light was comprehensively ignored. Cotton, riding in a horse-drawn buggy, had 260 camels for his baggage, making Sir John Keane’s personal baggage train of 100 camels as he later advanced up the Indus from Karachi appear quite modest. J. H. Stocqueler, editor of the Bombay Times who for a while traveled with the Bombay troops, thought the officers “regarded the expedition as little else than an extensive pleasure promenade—an enormous picnic” and that many “would as soon have thought of leaving behind their swords and double-barrelled pistols as march without their dressing-cases, perfumes, Windsor soap and eau-de-cologne.” The Sixteenth Lancers, who were leading the Bombay force, even brought a pack of foxhounds so they could go hunting. When Stocqueler offered the officers’ mess some boxes of fine cigars, he was politely rebuffed on the grounds that they already had two camel-loads of the best Manilas.
This was still a time when officers in the British, or “Queen’s,” army purchased their commissions and often their promotions. Officers paid for their own uniforms and equipment, making it almost impossible to be an officer without at least a modest private income. A young ensign had to spend almost all his first year’s pay to rig himself out. The arrangements, however, differed for the officers of the East India Company’s army. The company had its own military academy at Addiscombe in Surrey in England, where potential officers spent two years studying military matters, Hindi, mechanics and mathematics. They did not purchase either their commissions or their promotions. They were career soldiers mainly from middle-class backgrounds, in contrast to many of the Queen’s army officers who were often from more wealthy and aristocratic families and served for shorter periods. Queen’s army officers tended to look down on their East India Company colleagues, who were excluded from some of the highest-level posts in India such as that of commander in chief. Unsurprisingly, many company officers considered the Queen’s officer “always a mere bird of passage” who “should never command in India.”
The comforts of an officer’s life contrasted sharply with the lot of the private soldier, whether in either the British or the company army. Despite the heat, each European or Indian infantryman was required to wear a rigid leather stock around his neck to keep his head up and his eyes ahead. On his head was a tall shako of black cloth stretched over a wicker or wire frame with a leather visor and secured by a chin strap. He wore stiff white trousers whitened with pipe clay, his “red coat”—a serge swallow-tailed garment buttoned to the throat—and a white cross belt from which hung his sword and sixteen-inch steel bayonet. His cartridge belt held sixty musket balls, each an ounce and a third in weight, for his “Brown Bess” flintlock musket. A muzzle-loaded weapon, it was unchanged since the Battle of Waterloo and had an effective range of only up to 150 yards.14 On his back—unless he paid to have it carried by camel as some members of the Army of the Indus did in contravention of their orders—he carried a heavy rucksack holding the rest of his equipment.15
The private soldier was subject to harsh discipline—death by firing squad for striking an officer, refusing to obey orders or for cowardice, and public flogging with a knotted cat-o’-nine tails for lesser offenses. Although in 1812 the commander in chief of the army, Frederick, Duke of York, had ordered that no man should receive more than three hundred lashes, military courts retained powers to inflict up to three thousand. If a man fainted during punishment or was considered by doctors to be unfit to endure any more blows, he was given a few days to recover before the rest of the lashes were delivered. However, as recently as 1835, the then governor-general Lord William Bentinck had ordered that sepoys should not be flogged—a concession greatly resented by their British army brothers-in-arms, who were still so regularly flogged that the East India Company soldiers nicknamed them “bloody-backs.”
In Afghanistan, the soldiers of the Army of the Indus would encounter a very differently armed and equipped enemy. Dost Mohammed’s forces consisted primarily of mail-clad, metal-helmeted irregular cavalry armed with sword and lance. The standard firearm of both horsemen and foot soldiers was the long-barreled matchlock jezail, which not only was more accurate than the Brown Bess but fired a heavier bullet and had more than four times its range. A British officer examining a captured jezail was surprised to find that “the ramrod, when put down the barrel, extended fully a foot from the muzzle. There must have been four or five times as much powder in the charge as is contained in one of our cartridges.” The jezail took two or three minutes to fire and reload, compared with the British musket’s more rapid rate of fire of two, even three, rounds a minute when in practiced hands. The jezail was thus an ideal weapon for a long-range sniper on a hillside but less suited to conflict on the open battlefield, where its bearer would be unable to withstand the more frequent disciplined volleys from the Brown Bess musket. Afghans usually carried two, even three, loaded weapons with them. Having fired them, rather than stand and reload, they either retreated or advanced to fight hand-to-hand with sword and small, round shield.
Morale was high as Cotton’s forces passed into Bahawalpur, whose ruler Alexander Burnes, traveling in advance of the army, had persuaded to cooperate. However, as the terrain changed from tamarisk bushes to sand and date palms and the Indus drew nearer, some of the sepoys became unsettled. Sita Ram, a high-caste Brahmin of the Bengal Native Infantry seconded to Shah Shuja’s levies, explained why in his memoirs of the campaign: “[To cross the Indus] is forbidden by our religion and the very act means loss of caste. Consequently many sepoys obtained their discharge and many deserted.” He was also speaking for many of his countrymen when he wrote that the people of Sind, whose lands they would soon be entering, “were all Mohammedans whose language we did not understand and everything belonging to them was unclean.” Lieutenant Tom Holdsworth expressed doubts of another kind that were probably also quite typical. Though he wrote to his father, “I should like very much to see Kabul, Kandahar and all that part of the world, which so few Europeans have visited,” he added, “What is the cause of all this bustle and war I hardly know … How it will turn out I know no more than the man in the moon.”
From Bahawalpur, the Bengal force crossed into northern Sind, where, in late December, Burnes and Mohan Lal pressured the elderly and reluctant ruler of the rocky fortified island of Bukkur in the middle of the Indus into allowing the British forces to occupy it. Meanwhile, on receiving the not entirely unexpected news that the emirs of Sind were rallying their forces at their capital of Hyderabad and intending to oppose Keane’s advance through their lands from Karachi and the mouth of the Indus, Fane, still accompanying the force, ordered Cotton and the bulk of his Bengal troops to move down to support the Bombay army.
This show of force backed up by stern diplomatic threats was enough to convince the Sindi emirs to accept the imposition of Macnaghten’s treaty obliging them to let the British troops pass through their territories, to permit free navigation of the Indus and to make the required large payment to release themselves for all time from any claim from Shah Shuja of suzerainty or for tribute. When the emirs had rightly remonstrated that these demands ran counter to an agreement made only a year earlier, they were informed that “neither the ready power to crush and annihilate them, nor the will to call it into action, were wanting, if it appeared requisite, however remotely, for the safety or integrity of the Anglo-Indian Empire or frontier.” Cotton, like many of his officers and men, had hoped for prize money from the capture of wealthy Hyderabad, whose treasuries were reputed to contain 8 million pounds sterling in coin. Instead, he returned disappointed to Bukkur to oversee the construction of boat bridges to enable the army to cross the Indus.
The task was completed within eleven days and with considerable ingenuity. An officer of engineers described how they seized 120 boats, felled trees for beams and planks and in the absence of any rope made “500 cables out of a peculiar kind of grass which grows 100 miles from here,” by twisting the long fibrous stems together. They then made anchorage points in the river from “small trees joined and loaded with half a ton of stone. [Their] nails were all made on the spot. [They] then anchored the boats in the middle of the stream, in a line across, leaving twelve feet between each; strong beams were laid across the boats, and planks nailed on these for a roadway. This is the largest military bridge which has ever been made.” By 18 February 1839, the army, its equipment and supplies, as well as its thousands of camp followers, had passed over the Indus.
Reaching Shikarpur—a small, hot and dirty town of mud-brick houses where Shah Shuja and his levies had already arrived safely—Cotton halted. He did so to wait for Keane and the Bombay force to rendezvous with him and to allow supplies of grain, water and animal forage to be organized at regular intervals along his route across the 150-mile stretch of bleak, salt-rimed desert that lay between Shikarpur and the formidable Bolan Pass. Macnaghten, who had caught up, was fretting at the delay caused by what he considered the needless diversion of Cotton’s forces to Hyderabad. He was also alarmed by reports that Baluchi tribesmen planned to block the pass, and pressed Cotton to go on while he remained with Shah Shuja and the king’s levies until Keane arrived, when they would advance together. The reason Shah Shuja was to stay behind was insufficient baggage animals. Macnaghten had sought an additional one thousand camels from Cotton, who had refused him, claiming he could not spare them.
In fact, Macnaghten was soon barely on speaking terms with Cotton, who, he complained in a dispatch to Auckland a few weeks later, was a terrible defeatist: “Not content with telling me we must all inevitably be starved, he assures me that Shah Shuja is very unpopular in Afghanistan and that we shall be opposed at every step of our progress. I think I know a little better than this.” Cotton in turn accused the envoy of wishing to take over command of the army. The friction between the political and military leadership foreseen by the now departed Fane was only too evident.
On 22 February Cotton led his forces onward again, taking with him provisions for only six weeks and leaving Macnaghten and Shah Shuja behind with one of his own brigades, under the recently widowed fifty-six-year-old Major General William Nott, to guard his rear. Burnes and Mohan Lal traveled ahead of the main force, their task to try to negotiate with the Baluchi tribes through whose lands the army had to pass.
As the army plodded westward toward the Bolan Pass across the unforgiving scorpion-infested desert, temperatures touched one hundred degrees Fahrenheit, relieved only by occasional thundery showers when “the cool drops fizzed as they fell on the burning sand.” Two officers were found dead of heat stroke in their tents, their bodies blackened. Eleven men who lost their way and unwisely halted under a tree to drink brandy also collapsed and died. Such water as existed was muddy and brackish, and there was no food for the livestock. Lieutenant Henry Durand, an officer of engineers, later complained that they “marched into this tract of land as if possessed of miraculous powers of abstinence.” Pack animals died in their hundreds, while straggling beasts were seized by Baluchi tribesmen who were tracking the progress of the strange and cumbersome procession. Sita Ram wrote of the general despair, “Our sufferings were frightful and the livers of all the Hindustanis were turned to water.”
Macnaghten had requested Cotton to do nothing to inflame the local population as his army approached Afghanistan, but when robbers attacked a hospital wagon, killing and wounding its occupants, Cotton ordered any raiders to be shot on sight. Sixteen days after leaving Shikarpur the army reached Dadur at the mouth of the Bolan Pass. According to an agreement just negotiated by Burnes and Mohan Lal with Mehrab Khan of Khelat—the powerful Baluchi ruler who controlled the pass—food supplies adequate for the ten-day transit of the Bolan should have been waiting, but there was barely enough to feed the army for a day. Though the khan was blamed for this, the lack of supplies was not entirely his fault. The advancing army had already consumed much of his people’s crops as well as using up precious water supplies at a time of drought, and though he could not supply much grain, the khan did provide thousands of sheep. He also told Burnes that the British venture was foolhardy, even hopeless, saying that Dost Mohammed was an able and resourceful ruler and that though the British might displace him and set up Shah Shuja, they “could never win over the Afghan nation.” Such gloomy predictions did not endear the khan to Macnaghten, who wrote to Auckland urging that Khelat’s most important provinces be annexed to Shah Shuja’s kingdom—when he again had one.
Cotton, meanwhile, decided to push on into the Bolan Pass, knowing that there he would at least find water and hoping that when the army reached Quetta at the other end of the pass, supplies would be easier to come by. On 16 March the column began the arduous climb into the seventy-mile-long pass, which at its highest point reaches nearly six thousand feet. Heavy rains turned the stream running through the Bolan into a dangerous torrent, which the advancing force had to cross repeatedly. The ground behind them was soon littered with the carcasses of animals unable to stumble any farther, especially camels, which, Henry Havelock wrote, “never feel at home but on a plain and on soft ground” and which suffered horribly as they toiled uphill over bleak, stony terrain with “not a blade of grass, not a tree to be seen.” Another officer claimed that a tot of whiskey had a miraculously reviving effect on any beast that collapsed. The column also faced attack by tribesmen lying concealed with their long-barreled jezails behind the jagged outcrops above the pass, and whose behavior the khan of Khelat, whatever he might claim, was unable to control. The Reverend George Gleig, principal chaplain to the Army of the Indus, caught the menace of the wild desolate pass, “overlooked in all its narrower veins by clefts among which marksmen may stand, and high precipices, from the summits of which loosened rocks may be hurled.”
Yet at last the army emerged from the Bolan Pass into meadows of aromatic herbs and nodding tulips and irises, but so few cultivated fields of barley and wheat that one officer in desperation purchased ghee (clarified butter) from some passing Afghan merchants to keep his camels alive. On the chill morning of 27 March the hungry and somewhat demoralized army reached the mud-walled town of Quetta, having lost in the pass two thousand camels and the valuable supplies the animals had been carrying. Learning that Quetta held no more than two days’ supply of corn and that little more was to be found in the hinterland, Cotton put his men on half rations while he waited for the Bombay force and Shah Shuja’s levies to arrive. Camp followers struggled to exist on fried sheep skins, congealed animal blood and whatever roots they could grub up. Some of Cotton’s officers, though, spent their time shooting woodcock, while the botanists among them examined the wild anemones, buttercups, poppies and dandelions growing around Quetta that were such a relief after what one officer called the “dismal sterility” of the Bolan Pass.
On 4 April Sir John Keane finally arrived with the Bombay contingent and Shah Shuja’s levies and immediately assumed command of the entire Army of the Indus. Keane was a choleric man of nearly sixty who liked to be carried in a palanquin. He had fought in Wellington’s army during the Peninsula War and been wounded while leading an attack on New Orleans in the Anglo-American War of 1812. He had risen with the help of influential friends and was disliked by many for his coarse behavior and foul language. Henry Havelock wrote of Keane’s “open parade of private vices,” hinting that they were “only a cloak for darker features of his character.” The fact that Keane was not an East India Company officer was also held against him, given the rivalry between the officers of Queen’s regiments and those of the company.
Keane had had to pick his way under sniper fire around piles of rotting animal carcasses and human corpses “in every degree of putrefaction” as he advanced through the defiles of the Bolan Pass in Cotton’s wake. He had also experienced severe communications problems because the Baluchi tribesmen were attacking the cossids—native messengers employed by the British—and according to Lieutenant Holdsworth stealing official dispatches “to wrap their kebabs in.” Keane was therefore not in the best frame of mind when he reached Quetta and took command. He and Cotton quarreled immediately because Keane saw at once that the situation in Quetta was critical. Neither his own nor Cotton’s forces had any supplies. Keane decided his best option was to push on at once to Kandahar in the hope that their few remaining provisions would last until then.
Despite his reservations, he appointed Cotton to command the Bengal infantry, which till then had been led by the able but irascible Major General Nott, who, having rejoined the main force, was—so Keane informed him—to be left to garrison Quetta with a brigade. Keane appointed Major General Thomas Willshire, like Cotton and himself a British army officer, to command the two brigades of the Bombay infantry. Nott, who was senior to both Cotton and Willshire, was predictably convinced that Keane was sidelining him because he was a company, not a Queen’s, officer. From a relatively humble tenant-farmer background, Nott was deeply critical of the posting of Queen’s officers to India. Some years earlier, in 1834, he had warned in one of the Bengal newspapers of the consequences “if the long-tried and experienced Company’s officer is to be superseded and commanded by the silly and weak scions of the aristocracy, or by the men of interest, whom the whim or caprice of the Horse Guards may send across the Ocean.” A furious scene between Nott and Keane ended with the latter roaring that he would never forget Nott’s conduct “as long as I live!”
In the early morning of 7 April 1839, the Army of the Indus moved out, Shah Shuja’s levies in the lead once again for presentational reasons. The formidable Khojuk Pass lay between the army and the plains of Kandahar. Although shorter than the Bolan Pass, it was steeper, rising to almost 7,500 feet. In the thinning air a tangled mass of exhausted men and beasts struggled for breath as they ascended the narrow precipitous track. Moving the heavy artillery was a particular nightmare. Stripped to the waist and working in teams of one hundred alternating in thirty-minute shifts, sweating soldiers man-hauled the guns on long ropes. Once they had pulled one gun to the top of the pass, there was the even more difficult and dangerous task of getting it down the slope on the other side, which had a gradient of one in three, without it running away with itself. It took a week, but after a remarkable display of endurance and sheer grit, the guns were safely through the pass. Along the way, however, twenty-seven thousand musket balls and fourteen barrels of gunpowder had had to be abandoned—army engineers exploded them to keep them out of enemy hands—and three thousand long-suffering camels had either tumbled into precipices, collapsed through sheer exhaustion or been rustled by raiders.
Shah Shuja was once more in his ancestral territory. His attendants pitched his brilliantly colored royal tents close to the British encampment but not near enough to discourage a group of Afghan horsemen from galloping through the tents one evening. The raiders shot down twelve men and carried off two women and a pair of elephants—one of them Shah Shuja’s own mount. It was hardly an auspicious start to his renewed reign. To mark his return as king, the British invited him to tour their camp. Henry Havelock watched as Shah Shuja was carried on men’s shoulders “in a gilded litter fenced from the sun by a kind of circular dome, guarded by about sixty attendants in scarlet armed with javelins or drawn sabres, some carrying silver sticks, others touting their master’s title and all running along at a fast pace.” He thought “the most singular part of the costume of the monarch’s retinue” was their caps “of red cloth ornamented with long horns of black felt, which give the wearers the air of representing in masquerade the great enemy of the human race [ i.e the devil].” He was unimpressed by the king himself—a “rather stout man of the middle size, his chin covered with a long, thick, and neatly trimmed beard, dyed black to conceal the encroachments of time.”
Havelock also found fault with the king’s manner, which to his critical eye suggested “that mixture of timidity and duplicity so often observable in the character of the highest order of men in Southern Asia.” Though the king’s behavior toward the British was “gentle, calm and dignified,” his demeanor toward his own people was such that they “invariably complained of his reception of them as cold and repulsive even to rudeness.” Havelock also noted what Burnes had in vain pointed out to his superiors: that the Afghans regarded Shah Shuja as “a man of evil destiny, a kum nuseeb, or bud bukht.”
On 20 April a large body of horsemen approached the camp. Ignoring sentries’ warning shots, their splendidly armed and clad leader, gold-fringed turban on his head, trotted forward and indicated that he had come in peace to wait upon Shah Shuja. The man was Haji Khan Kakur, an influential Afghan chief, who prostrated himself before a gratified Shah Shuja and received permission to pitch his tents nearby. Haji Khan claimed that the rulers of Kandahar—Dost Mohammed’s half brothers—had been planning to attack the British column but that he had convinced them they would be defeated and to flee. Haji Khan was a noted and notable liar who, according to one British officer, had “commenced life in the humble capacity of a melon vendor and raised himself to the highest rank by cunning and enterprise … invariably changing sides when his interest prompted him to do so.” It is unclear whether on this occasion his claims were true. Yet before long, more chiefs arrived to pledge allegiance to the returning king.
With daytime temperatures still well above one hundred Fahrenheit, the Army of the Indus continued toward Kandahar, moving slowly across an arid and still mountainous landscape where the wells held only brackish and salty water. One officer noted in his diary, “no sweet water … great suffering among the soldiers, European and native, and the cattle.” Two days later, when the green ribbon of water that was the Dori River near Kandahar came in sight, parched men and animals rushed toward it. In their eagerness, horses tumbled down its steep banks, and many too weak to right themselves drowned. Keane ordered his army to make camp on the banks of the Dori, intending the following day to enter the walled city of Kandahar, whose rulers had indeed fled across the Helmand River toward Persia and which clearly would offer no resistance. However, next morning, 25 April, to Keane’s anger he awoke to discover that Macnaghten and Shah Shuja had, without any consultation with him, set off during the night with some of their men to Kandahar, into which Shah Shuja had made a ceremonial entrance at dawn.
Two weeks later, on 8 May, seated on a canopied platform and, as the army surgeon Dr. Richard Kennedy described, with “the chief and general staff of the British army on his left, and some half-a-dozen shabby-looking, dirty, ill-dressed Afghan fellows on his right,” Shah Shuja was formally proclaimed king of Afghanistan to a 101-gun salute. The moment passed “without, however, any symptom of the interest or enthusiasm which we were led to expect,” another officer noted. Though the crowds dutifully attended the ceremony, a subsequent military review before the Afghan king attracted few spectators. Sita Ram captured what many had known in their hearts for months: “The truth began to dawn on us that despite all the assurances Shah Shuja had given us in Hindustan that the Afghans were longing for his return, in reality they did not want him as their ruler.” In particular they resented that “he had shown the English the way into their country and that they would shortly take possession of it. They would use it as they had done all Hindustan and introduce their detested rules and laws.” The hatred of the foreign invader became soon and bloodily obvious. A young officer wrote home of his sense of vulnerability, describing “horrible” murders of those unwise enough to stray too far and how he always carried loaded pistols when he rode out.
MEANWHILE IN LONDON in the New Year of 1839, the British government faced an incessant clamor from Sir Robert Peel, the head of a critical Tory opposition, for the publication of all relevant documents justifying the Afghan invasion, citing the precedent of government publication of previous important documents relating to Indian policy.
Release would have been difficult enough since the government did not wish to expose the disagreements of Burnes, among others, with the proposed way forward, but there was also a further complication. Relations with Russia had thawed to such an extent that Britain was preparing to receive a state visit from the Czsarevitch, the future Alexander II and liberator of the serfs. Under the circumstances, publishing documents too openly critical of Russia seemed out of the question to the authorities. Hobhouse, the president of the East India Company’s Board of Control, summed up some of the objections to total disclosure in familiar terms: foreign relations difficulties, national security, impeding the progress of ongoing military operations and the impossibility of entrusting the public with sensitive information. “First—it would necessarily raise most embarrassing questions regarding the state of our relations with Russia. Secondly—it would put the Enemies of Great Britain in possession of most important information regarding the means of conquering the Indian Empire and of counteracting the measures in progress for defending it, and Thirdly—it might embarrass and weaken those measures by raising a premature discussion, and create unnecessary alarm in the Public Mind.”
In Parliament the prime minister claimed the opposition was playing party politics in asking for such disclosure and in so doing entirely disregarding the national interest. Eventually, however, the government had to give way. Bolstering itself with the comforting thought that previous disclosures on other matters had been selective, over the next few months it released a selection of papers both partial and edited. Palmerston, newly married to his long-term mistress Lady Cowper, himself masterminded the dilution of the anti-Russian content of the published material. Similarly, Hobhouse omitted key dispatches from Burnes promoting Dost Mohammed’s merits and claims and edited others that were published without making clear where the editing had taken place. When Burnes came to hear of it, he was deeply upset, believing, as did the great historian of the period, Sir John Kaye, that officials had “dug the grave of truth … The character of Dost Mohammed has been lied away; the character of Burnes has been lied away. Both by the mutilation of the correspondence of the latter.” The official records—“the sheet-anchors of historians”—had been falsified. Burnes himself wrote, “All my implorations to Government to act with promptitude and decision had reference to doing something when Dost Mohammed was King, and all this they have made to appear in support of Shah Shuja being set up!”
However, these concerns seemed to evaporate with the successful 1839 springtime visit of the Czarevitch to London and the opening of promising discussions between Russia and Britain about the vexed “Eastern question” of the two countries’ relations with Ottoman Turkey, as well as initial positive reports of the military campaign in Afghanistan. Few questioned whether, with a seeming new diplomatic détente having been reached with Russia, the Afghan intervention remained necessary. Yet when catastrophe struck, what one critic called “the garbled,” and others “the mutilated” and “eviscerated,” nature of the disclosures would return to haunt the government.